Ever considered stopping by your local Circuit City or Best Buy when your computer goes awry?

An eye-opening (for some) investigative report by the 10TV news crew out of central Ohio shines some light on the serious inadequacies of self-proclaimed tech support services of major retail computer stores. The IT specialist at 10TV helped set up the report by going into the BIOS on a perfectly functional notebook and changing one simple setting that would produce an error on startup. The consumer advisory branch of 10TV, Consumer 10, then took the faux-broken notebook to three major electronics store chains that offer tech support. The three stores perused were Best Buy (Geek Squad), Circuit City (Firedog), and Microcenter (does not have a stupid name for their tech support).

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Upon giving their ailing notebook to the tech support representatives at each store, they were charged the standard diagnostics fee of approximately $70 USD. At Circuit City, the report reveals that the Firedog technician apparently did absolutely nothing in the 7 days they had the computer, and didn’t even call the customer back at the culmination of the diagnostic period. When Consumer 10 went in to pick up the notebook, the technician showed them the same exact screen that appeared when the problem was first discussed, and stated that the operating system was fried and needed to be reinstalled (at an ultra-low price of just $130!!). At Best Buy, after a series of visits to the store, it was determined that not only was the hard drive dead (because it made clicking noises, and of course hard drives are not supposed to make noises!) and needed to be replaced for $80, but there would be a charge for installation of the actual hard drive and the operating system, for a total of about $170. Had Consumer 10 been an actual know-nothing customer, they would have ended up approximately $320 in the hole and no better off, considering the real problem with the notebook would not have been fixed by any of Geek Squad’s solutions. Microcenter’s tech support team on the other hand, was able to diagnose the problem correctly and provide a solution (changing the bad BIOS setting) without any significant hardware or software replacement.

The publicity generated by this report prompted responses from Best Buy and Circuit City, who both said that the tech support agents did not follow proper protocol or should have been able to fix the problem.

Bullshit. If you ever go to Best Buy and hang around the Geek Squad area just sort of watching what they do, it won’t take you very long to figure out that they are just a bunch of glorified salesmen that have been put in charge of fixing systems by formatting hard drives. Only.

Moral of the story, never take your broken computer to Best Buy or Circuit City, because their tech support branches (Geek Squad and Firedog, respectively) are seriously limited in both knowledge and capability to the extent that it is very difficult for them to actually fix a computer (do their jobs). If you absolutely must go in for tech support somewhere, it seems like Microcenter is your best bet. Or, you could always just chill on the FPSLabs.com forums and find answers for free. Restore default settings much?

Make sure to check out the video at the link below.

Source: 10TV.com, thru Digg

Popularity: 6% [?]

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